Let's spice things up, shall we. A few weeks ago, I
upgraded the Trusty instance on my Asus Vivobook to
Bionic, doing this via two consecutive updates in the same day, both rather successful. Then, I
installed Unity as the desktop environment of choice, and
did some basic testing, to see how well everything works. And well work everything (almost, 99%)
did.

Then, I thought, what about Plasma? After all, it is my desktop environment de jour, and I'm using
it in my production setup on the
Slimbook laptop. So it only makes sense to see what is
going to happen if the same exercise is applied to this device. Plus a twist. Hence the article.
Read.

Plasma installation

A simple one liner will do. I actually installed the full Kubuntu desktop - sudo apt-get
install kubuntu-desktop thingie whatnot. So yes, please note that this one liner will also install
Kubuntu's GRUB (black instead of aubergine for the background color), and Kubuntu's splash -
coruscating blue outline (plasma I guess) rather than Ubuntu's more orange-white glow. Tiny details,
but if you're extremely aesthetically minded, you need to be aware of this.

I let the command run, I selected SDDM as the login manager - this is very similar to what I showed
you with my
eeePC netbook experiment. A few minutes later, I logged out,
logged back in, and there, behold Plasma desktop!

In essence, this is
Plasma 5.12 LTS,
intended to be supported for full five years, and this goes hand in hand with the Ubuntu long-term
release model. So this was instantly familiar - and predictable - and pretty much exactly what I
already have configured on the Slimbook. Perhaps boring even. All right then, we ought to make it more
interesting. How about using an Unity-like layout to keep the nostalgia juices flowing?

Make Plasma look more like Unity

This ought to be a fun escapade. After all, Plasma is a highly flexible, customizable desktop
environment, and there's very little you can't do with it. Creating a vertical panel (launcher) layout
with a whole-screen overlay menu should be a breeze. Get it? Breeze!

I started by creating a default panel top of the screen, reduced its height, then removed the task
area. I then created a second panel, placed it on the left side, added the application menu launcher
plus the icons-only task manager. I adjusted the width of the top panel so that the chunkier, wider
vertical one would display fully, and this is important in order to have a nice big icon. I did need to
move the widget button around, and this was a bit frustrating - the whole drag 'n' drop is somewhat
clunky, but I managed.

Global menu & buttons

I tried using the global menu widget, and largely, this works fine - but there's a slight delay
creating and then deleting the menu when you switch context between applications. Unity does this more
smoothly. You also have window decorations, so moving the buttons to the left side does not make sense,
although it does feel logical with the left-side panel setup.

Software and such

Well, Plasma didn't use any of the Gnome or Unity settings, so I had to start from scratch in this
regard, including various file manager shortcuts and alike. I also had to add the home directory
places, like Downloads, Documents and the rest. All in all, this took about 10-15 minutes to sort out,
so that ain't too bad. I also changed the font color to black, and tried Ubuntu fonts instead of
Noto.

Most of what rests below Plasma remained functional, like the printer setup. But I couldn't
Samba without the
necessary tweak, and even then, no Samba timestamps
for you! I was able to use my smartphones without hiccups, and there were no other problems that would
somehow put Plasma in crosshairs. In general, the underlying system is robust, and the desktop doth not
interfere.

Resources & performance

As always, Plasma is phenomenally fast. Light, lithe, elegant. It's even a tad more responsive than
Unity, although that one is no slouch by any means. The differences will be almost imperceptible to the
ordinary user, but since I'm THE user, then I do perceive it, and it's quite small. Given that I've
never done any cleaning or pruning or anything, the machine runs as light as the first day I got it.
Very cool.

Memory usage stands at 500 MB - similar to the Slimbook Pro2, and the CPU does not make too much
noise. About 1.5% on idle, which is significantly better than what we've seen with other desktop
environments. Plasma truly stands out in this regard.

Battery life

Really, really good. Supremely good. First, the battery has only deteriorated to 90% its original
charge over the period of five and a half years. I also noticed the same thing with the little Asus
eeePC. Excellent quality in this regard. Second, you get a lot of juice even with moderate loads, and
with brightness reduced to 50%, the numbers really go up. At 90% capacity, 80% charge, I still had
about 3 hours and 50 minutes left. This translates to about 5 hours. With full brightness, you get 4
hours.

Alas, I don't have the original numbers from Trusty to compare to. We can only compare to what we
currently get with either Windows 8 or Unity, and for the latter, that's 4 hours (with 100%
brightness). The two are virtually identical. I will do some more testing, and try to find old
screenshots from five years ago, to see what kind of battery values I was getting back then. I'll also
look into the Windows side of things, because typically, Windows has very solid battery results,
comparable to Plasma. More on this in the future.

All is quiet on the Western front ... except ...

I did encounter a couple of problems. One-time issues, but they annoyed me ever so. One, while
tweaking the system area (making icons permanently shown or hidden), I got the plasmashell process to
crash. How very naughty. This issue has been around for a while, so I'd expect it to be fixed, fixed,
fixed!

Then, the system supposedly didn't have enough free memory to report the problem. What? I checked
the system resources, and at this point, there was still 350 MB of free RAM, plus 2.5 GB in
buffers/cache, which should be available and usable, plus there was no swapping at all (that's 4 GB
more, if needed). Very weird. This smells like a bug of its own - either way, completely unacceptable
for a system that does nothing, because at this point, I haven't even launched any applications or done
any work to even justify this sort of dialog.

I also encountered a
weird visual glitch - the top panel comes with a sort of dented right
border. It's supposed to be aligned fully into the top-right corner, but then there's this 5px gap or
so. I played with the panel quite some, and noticed this happens if you don't maximize the panel to the
full screen width. Then, any change in the width using the drag handles causes the right edge to sort
of get misplaced and jagged. Then, it's suddenly gone. Not sure how or why.

Top right corner, what?

Conclusion

The more you use a system, the more you detect potential problems. Mind, I haven't come up with
seven Slimbook
combat reports for no good reason (so far).
That said, Trusty gave me no grief at all, so I am a bit miffed that there were some glitches, both
with Unity and Plasma here. Mostly isolated problems that did not recur, so these could just be the
ghosts after the upgrade. Nothing major, and overall, 'twas a good test and post-upgrade
experience.

The good side of the coin is - the Plasma desktop environment is stylish, you can run it in the
nostalgia mode if you like, it's super fast, it's super efficient, with great responsiveness and
low battery usage, it works well, and offers a wealth of goodies. This is definitely a setup I'm
comfortable with, and I can use it for important, real productivity tasks. Now, the ideal state of
things would be Trusty Forever, but that's not possible. Looking across the entire spectrum of
operating systems, the golden days of stability and quality seem to be behind us. But while perfection
may be half an asymptote away, my Vivobook running Plasma is a very sensible solution for everyday
needs. In a way, Plasma has proven itself once again. And on that note, we end.